Book Review: Beginning Groovy And Grails

Book Review: Beginning Groovy And Grails
Author: Christopher M Judd, Joseph Faisal Nusairat and James Shingler
Publisher: Apress Inc
ISBN: 978-1-4302-1045-0

What I was looking for was a good beginning Groovy book. What I found was a good beginning Grails book. I know that the book covers Groovy in the first three chapters but I was wanting a little more. Anyway, the book does cover Grails fairly well over the next 10 chapters albeit a little dated. The Groovy chapters covers just enough to get someone setup and starting to program in Groovy. But what I want to use Groovy for initially testing and mocking my Java code. Unfortunately this book really didn’t cover any advanced Groovy based topics. Oh, well I’m sure that it’s available in other books.

The Grails sections are far more complete. This book really takes you from creating a web app from scratch using Grails. From the initial configuration to security, restful web services and implementing a reporting system the book covers many of the important areas of creating a web application with Grails. It takes a good approach at explaining the basics and gives enough information in most cases to get to on the right track in more advanced development. You will probably want to reference other texts after this one to bring you more up to date with the latest versions of Groovy and Grails and to cover specialized issues.

I liked the book but in the few areas where it was lacking like more Groovy support it made it a harder read than I expected. In all fairness I cannot really recommend this book as there are others that may be better suited for a beginning Groovy and Grails introduction. It’s not that this book is terrible it just that others are better and this one is a little dated.

Java User Group Meetings in June

This month I made a attempt to make several user group meetings in the Dallas area. The first one was the Java-Mug meeting last week. This month topic was Groovy. I like the concepts of Groovy that allows it to integrate with Java so well. I don't know how much I'll use it in project yet but I will keep it in mind.

The next one that I went to was the Grails talk at the Spring Users group. Grails seems a little like what we did in another project with PHP. It was never published and wasn't as complete as Grails but the same ideas. I might use Grails if I use Groovy for some quick prototyping. I'll just have to see...

The next day I went to the Next Big JDK Thing. They are starting a multi-month discussion on JRuby. My goal was to find out about JRuby and how it fits into Java. However, for what I saw it looks a little hacky. The Java connects are cumbersome and just doesn't visually fit in my opinion. The odds of me using JRuby is very slim. However, I can't wait for the November meeting on JavaFX...

Brian